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Wednesday, July 13, 2016

A Sense of Place

cj Sez: Today’s guest blogger is mystery author Martha Crites, who
gives us some great insights into how she created that all-important sense of place in a first draft. Take it away, Martha.

The 'toon is from Facebook.

Two Exercises to Entice Your Muse and Your Reader

My desk faces a bank of windows on the second story of my
home. The view reaches over trees and rooftops to a bank of clouds where a
small triangle of Lake Washington echoes the gray sky. July in Seattle still
doesn’t look like summer.

When I first began writing, Julia Cameron’s The Right to Write was one of the
most helpful books on my shelf. She begins each chapter with a lusciously
over-written description of her setting. And I believe she does this purposely.
I often use this as an exercise at the beginning of my writing sessions, as I
did in the first paragraph of this blog. Observing my surroundings lets me drop
into the story. What better invitation to pay attention to the details I might
otherwise fail to note. When I pay greater attention to writing about the
physical world, I open myself to magic and metaphor. So I give myself
permission to write everything surrounding my story. Editing is for later.

But edit I must. I write mystery novels and take the
commitment of telling a good, page-turning story very seriously. So I set out
to season my writing with place and use it to reflect my character’s emotions
and experiences.

Place should provide more than a backdrop for plot. Place not
only sets the mood, it can deepen the psychology of the story. Donald Maas,
literary agent and author of Writing the
Breakout Novel, gives writers this
exercise to encourage more compelling work: Return to a previously established
setting and show how your character’s perception has changed. With some
trepidation, I looked back at my novel through the lens of his method to deepen
the psychology of place. Would my book measure up to the bar he had set?

In my novel, Grave
Disturbance, protagonist Grace Vaccaro, evaluates people with serious
mental illness in Seattle, a stressful job that brings her to dark corners of
the city, but her home is thirty miles away in the bucolic countryside.

“The
wind carried a briny scent from the Puget Sound half a mile downhill. The
muscles in my shoulders had hardened into painful knots, and I couldn’t get
away fast enough. I accelerated past the brick façade of the old art deco style
hospital and flew down James Street hill onto the freeway. With no traffic to
impede me at that late hour, I sped across Lake Washington on the 520 floating
bridge. Most nights, the tension of the job fell away with each mile when I
left the city for the rainy foothills. My home life provided calm and balance
to the tragedy of broken lives I saw at work each day. Now I’d lost that
balance.”

Whew! Perception changed. So writing through my senses helps
me to get out of my head and into the story. Then later I return and make it
work even harder for the story. So if you would like to help the setting rise
above mere background, try these two exercises.

***

Martha Crites has worked in the community and inpatient mental
health field for twenty years and taught at the Quileute Tribal School on the
Washington coast. She lives with her husband in Seattle. When she isn’t working
and writing, you will find her walking . . . or volunteering on the Camino de Santiago
in Spain.

Grave Disturbance is a
current finalist for the 2016 Nancy Pearl Award. Please visit her at www.marthacrites.com

Adam Woog of the Seattle
Times writes: Martha Crites’ debut, “Grave Disturbance”
is a dark and compelling story set mainly in the Cascade foothills.

Grace
Vaccaro is a mental-health evaluator (as is the author) caught up in bad
business after a filmmaker, working on a documentary about native land rights,
is murdered. Not surprisingly, one of the book’s strongest elements is its
protagonist’s skill as a mental-health professional in teasing clues out of
other people’s heads.

cj Sez: Because a well-developed sense of place arouses memories and
personal feelings, it is a powerful tool to draw your reader deeply into the
story. Thanks so much for this wonderful post, Martha. I really appreciate
the exercises, and I love the title to your latest mystery. Congratulations on Grave Disturbance being named a
finalist for the 2016 Nancy Pearl Award! All best wishes for super sales and
rocking reviews.

Okay,
you-all guys keep on keeping on, and I’ll try to do the same. Thanks for
stopping by. By the way, how do you handle those delicious details and sense of
place?

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